It has become popular in ornamental horticulture to place discrete quantities of fertilizer in the earth for use by individual plants as opposed to general, somewhat homogeneous application of fertilizer over broad areas as is common in field horticulture for the propagation of botanical materials that usually are of the same type and occupy larger areas. In the recent past in placing such fertilizer it has become popular to use a consolidated fertilizer mass that has been formed into the shape of a stake with a pointed end that may be driven into the earth at the place desired for fertilizer application to thereafter disperse its fertilizer components into the surrounding soil. Such fertilizer stakes are simple and easy of use, but they are somewhat difficult to form so that they maintain their configuration to withstand physical forces placed upon them prior to and during placement and yet provide an appropriate release of the fertilizer materials from which they are formed or which they carry. Fertilizer stakes also are relatively expensive, often costing several times the amount of a similar quantity of dry, granular fertilizer containing the same amount of botanical nutrient material.
Various hand tools for placement at a particular location of various materials in and beneath the soil, especially seeds, other propagative plant material and fertilizer, have heretofore become known. To be practically useful, such tools must be easily insertable into the earth and this generally requires that a lower portion of the device that first contacts the earth be of a sharp or pointed nature to aid entry and moving soil out of the path of the tool as it moves therethrough. Various prior art devices have not provided a well defined, sharp lower portion.
The force required for tool insertion into soil often is greater than can be reasonably accomplished by manual means. Prior tools have provided various foot supports, usually of a fixed nature, to allow a user's foot to aid insertion of the tool into soil.
Prior art tools have provided pivotally openable bottom doors, but during placement in the earth of such prior tools it has been common that the door may be moved laterally and askew of its pivotal axis by reason of non-symmetrical forces caused on the door, as by irregularities in the earth at the place of insertion or the type of manipulation of the tool by a user. If this occurs, the door mounting structure may be damaged and ultimately rendered inoperative or broken.
It is desirable in a tool for the placement of granular fertilizer that predetermined amounts of fertilizer may be placed and that these predetermined amounts may be varied. Prior tools have often not provided means for measurement of material to be placed or those that have allowed such measurement often have not allowed variation of the measurement.
Accordingly, there is a need for a gardening tool that overcomes these and other disadvantageous.